


Tea and Sympathy

by osprey_archer



Category: Torchwood
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Sickfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-09
Updated: 2012-12-21
Packaged: 2017-11-20 16:35:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 13,562
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/587478
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/osprey_archer/pseuds/osprey_archer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Soon after Jack's disappearance, Owen takes sick. Ianto goes to check on him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

One week after Jack disappeared (was taken, didn’t leave—Ianto is firm with himself on this point), Owen disappears as well. He doesn’t show up at work or answer any of his telephones, no matter how Ianto threatens or Gwen wheedles on his voicemail. 

So after Ianto gets off work he drives to Owen’s flat to check on him. They’ve all been fragile since Jack left—was taken—so maybe Ianto is checking out a sense of duty. Or maybe Ianto just doesn’t know what to do with himself when he actually gets time off Torchwood. Being Jack’s part-time shag is, was, a full-time job. 

Maybe Ianto is still angry with Owen, and is hoping he’s weak enough that Ianto can exact some revenge. 

Owen doesn’t answer when Ianto knocks, even to tell him to fuck off. He’s probably pulling at a bar, getting shit-faced when they need him. 

Ianto picks the lock. He wouldn’t be a member of Torchwood if he had any respect for other people’s privacy. 

Not that Owen seems to care about privacy. His apartment has glass walls. Exhibitionist, Ianto thinks, watching the rain gush like a waterfall over the dark windows. Someone will see him if he turns on the lights, so he doesn’t; he just drifts slowly toward the windows, staring out at the misty swoops of light and feeling almost tranquil. 

A click, the hammer of a gun drawn back. Ianto turns. Owen’s in the bed across from the windows, arm outstretched and bluish in the dimness, the gun only a smudge of shadow. Payback, Ianto thinks, payback’s a bitch, “Owen—” 

“Ianto.” Surprised; Owen must have thought he was an intruder. Owen drops the gun and fumbles with the lamp, snarling. “Ianto?” 

He gets the lamp on, finally, though he can’t seem to grip the knob properly; his fingers are as long and brittle as dragonfly legs, and trembling. Ianto can smell sweat baking off him, he can hear Owen’s breath rattling, and Owen’s eyes are bloodshot and wild and glaring.

Ianto collapses into mental default. “Would you like a cup of coffee?”

Owen stares at him incredulously. “Sod off.” 

“Do you have coffee here or should I go find a café?”

“Sod. Off.”

“Which way to the kitchen?”

Owen pulls the covers over his head and ostentatiously ignores Ianto. Ianto ignores him too. Just the idea of making coffee for someone who won’t let it sit at her elbow to go cold while she runs tests on the Rift as if that could bring Jack back is like a drug. 

Owen’s kitchen has crystal stemware, excellent alcohol, and a stockpile of cooking gadgets that have probably never been used. Ianto digs out a nearly empty bag of coffee beans, which must have been nice before they went stale, and brews them in a state-of-the-art coffeemaker that’s gathered a thin film of dust. 

It’s nice to know that Ianto isn’t the only one with no life outside of Torchwood. 

The coffee wounds Ianto’s professional pride. It’s too weak because of the paucity of coffee beans; Owen will hate it. He sets it on Owen’s bedside table anyway, next to where he thinks Owen is. It’s hard to tell because the blankets are heaped up so high; it could just be a bump in the comforter. 

Owen peaks his head out of his cocoon. He scowls at the coffee and at Ianto, lip curled. One arm snakes out and knocks over the mug, and Owen disappears under the covers again. The smell of sweat and alcohol drifts out as he rustles the bedclothes.

Ianto watches the coffee dribble down the bedside table. Really, he ought to leave, but now he can’t. I’m not addicted to making people beverages—I can quit any time I want! Right. “Perhaps you would prefer tea?” 

“Fuck off,” Owen rasps. 

Ianto collects the cup and cleans up the spill and digs through Owen’s kitchen equipment until he finds a kettle. Washes it, fills it, fiddles with the stove, digs through Owen’s cabinets for some tea as he waits for it to whistle. “Which bar did you go to?” he calls.

Silence. Ianto is impressed; Owen usually can’t stand to be silent.

The kettle whistles just as Ianto unearths some decrepit chamomile tea. There doesn’t appear to be any mold so he lets it steep. “Which bar?” he asks.

“I didn’t go to a bar.” 

Ianto flips a tea towel over his shoulder and carries the tea out to Owen. “How many bars?” asks Ianto, setting down the tea and stepping back, hands folded. Owen regards the tea as if it might be an alien life form. 

“Did you boil dust bunnies?” asks Owen. 

“It was in your cupboard,” Ianto says. “Chamomile, it said it was.”

Owen knocks the cup over again. Ianto kneels to wipe it up. This close, Ianto can hear Owen’s break rattling in his throat. There’s a bruise behind his ear. Ianto wonders if there are more. “Did you try to fight another Weevil?” 

“Three of them at the same time,” Owen mutters. 

“Should’ve called for backup.” 

“I didn’t want to interrupt you lot whingeing about Jack. I can catch aliens just as well without you lot getting in the way. ” 

Ianto stands up too quickly. He knows Owen’s joking (right?) but still, Owen has no right to go alien hunting without them. “You should have called us,” he says, grabbing the teacup and retreating to the kitchenette. More tea. Measure the tea into the filter, pour the water, watch it steep. Tea brewing: the new path to nirvana. 

Owen hurls the teacup at the window. The window holds but the teacup shatters like fireworks, and Owen sits panting as though he ran a marathon. Sweat beads on his upper lip and sticks his shirt against his chest. He collapses back onto the bed, coughing.

“If you would rather I could get you a box of tissues and a pint of ice cream and a copy of the six-hour version of Pride and Prejudice?” says Ianto. 

“It was your boyfriend who left,” chokes Owen. 

“He was taken,” snaps Ianto. He should have said, so you’ve upgraded me to boyfriend, he should have said— 

“Fuck he was,” says Owen, but he can’t get the breath to make it sound mocking instead of hurt. He lapses into coughs, his body jerking with the hacks. 

The coughing goes on and on. Ianto half-expects (wants? But he isn’t mad at Owen now, which is novel) blood-spatters, given how consumptive he looks. Owen notices Ianto watching, and Ianto knows he’s sick because Owen doesn’t preen for it. He slinks back under the covers and snarls, “Why are you here?” 

Because Jack is gone and Gwen is having a second honeymoon with Rhys (dying always makes relationships better) and Tosh is doing Toshly things and Ianto doesn’t have a life outside of Torchwood and would rather listen to Owen snipe than spend the evening in the Hub, or driving in the rain, or pulling in a bar. There are bars for all kinds of kinks but forcing hot beverages on people is not one of them.

Ianto doesn’t like that thought process (anything that relates Owen, who he hates, to pulling is…no, he’s not going there, not with Owen staring at him dark-eyed with his shirt sticking to his chest). He cleans up the broken teacup instead. “I’ll get you another cup of tea,” he says. “As that one wasn’t to your taste.”

“I hate you,” Owen mutters, and coughs pathetically.

Ianto reheats the water and digs through Owen’s cupboard again and is rewarded with a tin of tea that looks drinkable. Owen is nothing but a pair of bloodshot dark eyes peeping over the bedspread, narrowed as he watches Ianto progress to the bedside table. 

He doesn’t knock the tea over this time. Ianto waits for a while, and then says, “You should drink it.” 

“I bet you poisoned it.” 

“Teaboy guild law prohibits poison.” 

Owen glares at him over the blankets, clearly not sure whether Ianto is joking or not. Ianto sits next to him on the bed, pushing the blanket down so he can see Owen’s face. “You’re supposed to drink a lot of fluids when you’re sick,” he says.

“They never mentioned that one in medical school.” 

“Will you drink it yourself or do I need to hold the cup?”

No response. After about twenty seconds of Owen staring fixedly over his shoulder at the lights across the bay, Ianto picks up the cup and holds it to Owen’s lips. Owen presses his mouth shut more tightly. Ianto can feel the breath puffing out of his nose, fast and angry. “You really don’t want me to spill this,” says Ianto. 

Owen glances at him, and Ianto almost lets up because he looks so distressed. But Owen’s chapped lips part—the lower lip scrapes over Ianto’s finger—and there’s nothing for it but to give him the tea. Some of it dribbles down Owen’s chin. Ianto wipes it off with the tea towel. Owen flinches. “Do you want more?” 

Owen makes a wretched little noise, which Ianto translates as “Damned if I’m actually going to ask you for it.” Ianto makes a whole pot this time and knocks Owen’s hand away when he reaches for the teacup. He cups Owen’s head with one hand and holds the cup to his lips with the other. 

Owen is much more appealing when he can’t talk. He looks fragile, his cheekbones sharp and flushed, dark eyelashes (he closed his eyes), his breath on Ianto’s right hand. Ianto’s left supports Owen’s head; his elbow rests on top of a pile of blankets that probably cover Owen’s shoulder. Owen shifts uncomfortably and frowns, just a little, adorably, and Ianto kisses his forehead. 

Ianto pulls away fast enough that he spills on himself, the lukewarm tea staining his cuffs. Owen would sneer if he saw Ianto’s dabbing frantically at the blotches, but his eyes stay closed and his lips a little parted and damn, Jack’s only been gone a week, Ianto can’t be so desperate yet that Owen—

This is the wrong situation to think about Jack, who would probably be all for jumping Owen then and there. (“Threesome, Ianto?”) Kissing Owen again (just his forehead, after all) seems harmless in comparison. And his eyelids, his earlobes, his cheekbones. Owen tastes like salt—sweat and maybe tears.

Ianto hesitates over Owen’s mouth, close enough to taste his breath. Owen turns his face away and Ianto comes to his senses. This is Owen, who he hates, and Jack has only been gone a week, and damn it, damn it, maybe he couldn’t pick up someone to make tea for but he could definitely pick someone up for just sex, except he doesn’t want just sex; he wants Owen: twitchy and vulnerable and unhappy. 

Fortunately he recognizes that’s a bad idea. Torchwood hasn’t quite sucked out all his humanity after all. He leaves, and drives around Cardiff in the rain all night, and tells himself firmly that this is never, ever happening again.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“What’s in the bag?” asks Owen. “A bomb? Jack’s hand in a fish tank? An alien aphrodisiac from Splot?”_

The road to Hell may be paved with good intentions, but Ianto wouldn’t know. He can’t seem to keep to any of his intentions, good or bad, and that’s why he’s breaking into Owen’s apartment for the second night in a row. It’s really Owen’s fault. He should have called in sick. 

About halfway through the lock-picking attempt Ianto realizes that the door’s unlocked. Either an alien has gotten to Owen, or…

Ianto pushes open the door. “Took you long enough,” says Owen.

It’s a better welcome than a gun pointed at his head, at least. Owen’s half-sitting up in bed, wearing a white t-shirt that he might have stolen off Andre the giant (Ianto can see his collarbones). He combed his hair, or tried to. Ianto wants to smooth it down. Damn obsessive-compulsive tendencies.

“What’s in the bag?” asks Owen. His voice is still hoarse but the mockery has returned. “A bomb? Jack’s hand in a fish tank? An alien aphrodisiac from Splot?” 

Ianto never blushes anymore: a legacy from Jack. It’s just coffee beans, anyway. Ianto holds them up for Owen’s viewing pleasure. “An alien aphrodisiac from Costa Rica,” he says. “Torchwood’s finest.”

“You stole it?” says Owen, as if Ianto stealing breaks some law of nature. Owen—despite all evidence (Lisa) to the contrary—likes to think he’s more devious than Ianto. “You?”

Ianto nods, though he didn’t. He considered it but couldn’t go through with it. The lie is worth the clear “what the _fuck_?” on Owen’s face. 

This feels almost comfortable. Perhaps despite everything he and Owen can create something resembling an amicable relationship. “You’ve been waiting for me?” Ianto prompts.

Owen frowns. “I figured you couldn’t resist another chance to torture me with your terrible coffee.” 

“The terrible coffee was from your cupboard,” says Ianto. “And you never tasted it, so you can hardly know if it was good.” 

“Oh, but I do know,” says Owen, and his smile sharpens. “You made it, and your coffee is never any good.”

God, he hates Owen. “I’ll leave you to work with the coffee maker, then,” says Ianto, and sets down the coffee and leaves. 

Owen follows him, hanging off the door, goose pimples rising on his arms. “Scared you off, did I?” he calls, snide and delighted. 

Ianto stalks back, grabs Owen’s shoulders, and pushes him back into the flat. Owen pushes Ianto’s back, and Ianto stumbles a little, but Owen is weak with sickness and Ianto grabs his wrists and slams them against the wall. Owen tries to kick him. Ianto pushes him against the wall again.

“You don’t know when to quit,” he snaps at Owen.

“ _I_ don’t know when to quit?” Owen’s bony wrists twist in Ianto’s grasp, but Ianto doesn’t loosen his grip. “You kept your psychotic girlfriend alive for months in the basement, you still think Jack is coming back—”

Ianto holds both Owen’s wrists in one hand, and twists the other in Owen’s shirt to lift him off the floor. Owen chokes a little, and snarls, “—so pathetic, you can’t let go of anything—”

Ianto drops him. Owen lands in an angular heap. 

“That’s what they call a metaphor,” says Ianto. 

“You’re just as psychotic as cybergirl,” says Owen. “You might even be as psychotic as Jack.” 

Ianto kicks him, or tries to, but Owen grabs his foot and next thing Ianto knows he’s on the ground throbbing from tailbone to head and Owen looks concerned: “Ianto?” 

Ianto moans, mostly to see if Owen flinches (he does). Owen really has beautiful eyes. “Your floor is almost as hard as your head,” Ianto says. 

“Oh, shut it,” says Owen, without force. He sits back and pulls his knees to his chest. He’s shivering, out of apology? fear? Owen starts coughing, and Ianto concludes it’s fever. “Here, look at my finger, follow it.”

“I haven’t got a concussion,” says Ianto, pushing himself into a sitting position. He feels dizzy, but damned if he’s going to look weak in front of Owen. 

“You should try the gun again next time,” says Owen. His teeth have started to chatter. “Must easier than beating me to death.” 

“I’m not aiding in your fantasies of heroic suicide,” Ianto says, standing. “Get back in bed before you freeze.” 

Of course if Ianto puts it that way Owen won’t move. Ianto kneels down again (his head protests the movement), puts his hands under Owen’s armpits, and drags him to his feet. Owen smells sourly of sweat. “Come on now,” Ianto says. “To bed with you.”

“Is that how you talk to Jack?”

“Jack doesn’t need any prompting.” Ianto grips Owen’s sides more firmly and propels him forward. “You’re never going to shut up about him, are you?”

“He’s a bastard.” 

“So are you,” says Ianto. 

Owen twists to look at Ianto over his shoulder, confused and cute again as he was last night. Ianto pushes him gently onto the bed. It doesn’t feel safe to mention coffee yet, so he says, “Are you hungry?” 

Owen burrows under the covers. “The menus are in the drawer.”

The menus are crumpled and spotted with grease and drink rings. Ianto wants to wash his hands just touching them. “Pizza or Chinese?” he asks. 

“Pizza,” says Owen. “You can’t spoon feed it to me.” 

Ianto gets very busy with the telephone. 

He tips the pizza delivery boy well—he always tips pizza deliveries well, as if that makes up for that girl from Jubilee Pizza that Lisa killed. He sits next to Owen on the bed, which is nearly big enough for an all-Torchwood orgy, and they chew in silence. Owen gives up halfway through his second slice and watches Ianto eat until Ianto feels screamingly uncomfortable. It’s not really a lustful look, but dammit, Ianto’s supposed to be the one watching Owen, not the other way around.

“We found two baby brontosaurus in Splot,” he says in self-defense.

“Did they try to eat you?”

“No. They were very playful, actually. Very cuddly. Tosh wanted us to keep them as pets.”

“Typical.”

“But then one of them spontaneously combusted in the Hub.” 

Owen sighs. “Nothing exciting, then.” 

Ianto feels obscurely sorry that he doesn’t have a more impressive story for Owen. “It ruined my suit,” he offers.

Owen snorts and starts coughing again. Ianto gives up on the pizza. “Coffee,” he says with decision, packing up the pizza and marching off to the kitchen. “Coffee?” he calls to Owen. 

No reply, but surely Owen doesn’t want to miss the main event of the evening. He really does have a nice coffee maker. Anyone with such good taste in coffee makers must be all right underneath. 

Ianto makes coffee so perfect that just the aroma would make Jack shag him senseless. Owen ignores it. 

Two nights in a row is really too much. “Well, drink it, then,” says Ianto. Owen shakes his head, and it occurs to Ianto that maybe Owen really doesn’t like his coffee. Never mind he drinks five liters a day. Maybe he just likes making teaboy jump. 

“I’m going to be sick,” says Owen, and Ianto is about ready to beat him to death with the coffee maker, but then Owen really is sick, disgustingly, until his face is ashen and his eyes bloodshot and teary. 

“Ah,” says Ianto. “Oh.”

Ianto finds some bags in the kitchen and piles the soiled blankets into them. It’s not quite as disgusting as spontaneously combusted brontosaur. At least it doesn’t get all over his suit—Jack liked this suit. “Perhaps some tea?”

“No,” snaps Owen, in a tone that suggests he thinks tea is a prelude to ravishment. 

“I’ll need your shirt at least,” says Ianto, which is the wrong follow-up request. But Owen removes the filthy t-shirt without protest.

There are a couple bruises on his skinny, skinny chest, and goose pimples already rising. He looks like an anorexic’s pin-up; he can’t have eaten since Jack left. Ianto realizes he’s staring and rushes off with the bags. 

When Ianto comes back Owen’s huddled under his two remaining blankets, shivering and smelling like he tried to drown himself in mouthwash. Ianto sits next to him. Now that the bed’s not covered with Owen’s entire linen closet he can smell how rank it is. “Do you have any other sheets?”

“The sheets are fine.”

“They smell like they’re breeding cholera.” 

“Then maybe they’ll get you sick,” says Owen. “And then I can come over to your flat and torture you.” 

He’s hoping to get a rise out of Ianto, so Ianto leans back into the pillows and hooks his hands behind his head. Owen frowns. “Do I have to insult your mother to get you to go away?” 

“It wouldn’t hurt.”

“She’s sleeping with Jack,” says Owen.

“Everyone’s sleeping with Jack,” says Ianto.

“Doesn’t that bother you?”

It sounds like a serious question. Ianto stares fixedly out Owen’s windows and tries to steer the conversation back to safe waters. “My mother, or—?”

“Everyone.” Still seriously. 

Ianto always figured that was the price of keeping Jack interested in him: with no one else to occupy him Jack would get sick of boring old Ianto Jones in a week. Owen starts coughing again. Ianto puts an arm around his shoulders. 

“I think you’re clinical,” says Owen, between coughs. “You have a clinical need to be needed. That’s why you liked Jack, he’s like a great sucking black hole that drags everything out of you and doesn’t give anything back.”

“Like,” says Ianto, leaning his cheek on Owen’s hair. “I still like him.” 

He braces himself for some annihilating comment. Owen shifts restlessly and mutters, “Why are you here?”

“I don’t know.” 

“Does it ever occur to you that it’s a bad thing that you only like me when I’m dying?” 

“No,” says Ianto. He suspects most of the world prefers Owen when he’s incapacitated. “Who says I like you, anyway?”

Owen sinks out from under Ianto’s arm, under the covers. He rolls onto his side away from Ianto. “Turn the lights off on your way out.”

Ianto turns off the lights and sits down next to Owen again. He doesn’t stroke Owen’s hair, but it’s so tempting. Beyond tempting. All right, he does stroke it a bit, but Owen doesn’t object.

“Did Gwen and Tosh ask about me?” Owen asks.

“Tosh thought we ought to send you the second dinosaur.” 

“Oh,” says Owen in a very small voice.

“That was before the first one exploded,” Ianto reassures him. “They were very cuddly then.” 

“Oh,” says Owen again.

“But then Gwen gave one of them coffee and…well. Now we have stains of baby dinosaur goo all over the Hub.” Owen’s teeth start chattering again. Ianto gives in to temptation and lies down next to him, face in his neck and arm around his waist. 

“I’ll be sick on you if you try anything funny.” 

“I’ll be a perfect gentleman,” Ianto murmurs in his ear. 

Owen flinches. “I mean it,” he says. “Moving makes me nauseous.” He turns his head, trying to see Ianto over his shoulder. “I don’t think it’s possible for you to be a gentleman in that position.” 

“This is perfectly within the bounds of propriety,” says Ianto. “All these layers of cloth between us. Your clothes, your filthy sheets, two blankets, my clothes…”

His clothes. His poor suit, when he already ruined one today with the exploded brontosaur. He gets up. “Where’re you going?” Owen mutters. 

Ianto divests himself of his coat and tie. “Hanging up my suit. Can I borrow some of your clothes?”

“No.”

“You’re right, this will work so much better if I’m naked. I’m not ruining my suit for you, Owen.”

“Go plunder my closet then.” 

Owen is mostly asleep by the time Ianto returns. Ianto lies down next to Owen again (he considers getting under the covers, but he suspects even dozing Owen will protest and anyway he can’t deal with the filthy sheets), puts an arm around his waist, and presses his face into Owen’s hair. 

He’s way too comfortable snuggling up to a guy whose head he tried to kick in half an hour ago. But at the moment Owen is quite as cuddly as the baby brontosaur was before it exploded, so Ianto holds him close and falls asleep. 

He does have the presence of mind to leave before Owen wakes up.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The brontosaur whuffs and Owen, in an outbreak of sentimentality that is surely of symptom of his illness, entertains the idea of old blankets in some corner of his flat for the thing, which he will call George or Fluffy or possibly Ianto (in case it explodes).

Owen wakes up Ianto-less the next morning, which irritates him no end. If Ianto wants to hold him all night, then he damn well ought to stay for breakfast, not sneak off and leave Owen shivering and bereft and wondering what the hell the teaboy is thinking. 

The question is unanswerable. Owen sulks as he warms up the weak milky coffee Ianto left him and, once it’s percolated through his brain enough to wake him up, considers how to regain control of the Ianto situation. 

A) He can avoid Ianto. Unfortunately this will only work if Ianto agrees to avoid him too, which he won’t, so either Owen will have to put an exploding lock on his door or start living under a bridge or it isn’t even really an option. 

B) He can be even more horrible to Ianto than usual. Eventually even Ianto will give up in the face of unceasing abuse. (The evidence of the past two nights not-withstanding.) There is a distinct chance that this course will lead to Ianto shooting Owen, though, and Owen is pretty sure that Ianto’s spent some time practicing with firearms since last time. 

C) He can fuck Ianto. Of course this will make things even more awkward and bitter and awful, but being awkward and awful because of extremely ill-advised sex is smack in the center of Owen’s comfort zone. Unfortunately, he suspects that repeatedly sleeping with Jack will have ruined Ianto for this option; having had the best sex in the universe, how could Ianto possibly settle for less?

Owen doesn’t decide right away. He layers on coats till he looks like a derelict and goes to work (if he and Ianto have to interact, at least Owen can put them on relatively neutral ground).

Ianto, damn him, greets Owen with coffee and concern. “Perfectly fine,” snaps Owen, before Ianto can ask. The coffee makes him nauseous. Everything makes him nauseous. He wants to curl up on a couch and die somewhere. “Where are Tosh and Gwen?” 

“Getting food for Anwen—the brontosaur.” 

Shit. The whole point of coming to work was that he wouldn’t be alone with Ianto again.

“There are brontosaurus bits in the autopsy room,” says Ianto, cool as if he hadn’t spent the night with Owen. “See if you can find out what made it explode.” 

Fortunately Ianto leaves Owen alone to wobble to the autopsy room with his dignity intact. Owen sits on the steps and stares at the bits of brightly-scaled flesh waiting in test tubes, holding the coffee mug between his hands and drifting into a fugue state. Somehow he tests the brontosaur bits with something, and next thing he knows one of the test tubes explodes. 

Ianto checks in on the lab. “What was it then?” he asks. 

“Caffeine,” says Owen, certain he’s right although uncertain why, and not thinking about it too hard because not vomiting in front of Ianto occupies all his attention. 

Ianto leaves and Owen makes it to a toilet before he’s sick. It occurs to him afterward that Ianto surely heard that—Ianto has the preternatural ability to hear anything that might dirty the Hub—but Ianto leaves him alone and Owen leans his head against the sink and tells himself he’s glad. 

He stays there until Tosh and Gwen get back with a bag of lettuce that brings a knee-high brontosaur running. “Morning!” calls Gwen, almost as cheerful as before Jack left. “Onward, Anwen!” she cries, and a blue-striped brontosaur rushes to tackle Owen. 

Tosh and Ianto get it off him before it loves him to death, like a blue scaly golden retriever. Ianto hauls Owen to his feet. “She’s cute, isn’t she?” says Tosh, in the breathless voice that means she’s recalled that she thinks she’s in love with Owen.

“As a tarantula,” Owen says, hoping to cut her off early. But Tosh taught Anwen a trick and she’s determined to show him, and it would actually be pretty fantastic if it didn’t make Owen feel sick to his stomach just watching the thing do a somersault. 

Ianto praises the brontosaur and gives Tosh coffee, Gwen gives Owen a look laden with disgust (he suspects she sicced Anwen on him as preemptive punishment), and Tosh watches Owen and gets flustered and unhappy and takes her new pet away to teach it how to use her computer or something. 

Owen wants to take Tosh aside sometimes and explain the world to her. Pretty much everyone, he would say, is really a bastard like him, except they hide it better so they can get you right where they want you before they strike. Tosh would be so much better off if she’d stop letting people see how much she wants to be liked and just acted like him instead.

But that would require spending time with Tosh, and Owen thinks her puppy act will be catching and they’ll collapse into a pathetic mutually adoring relationship until her prince will appear through the Rift (perhaps Tommy Brockess will finally stick around), and she’ll run off with him and they’ll be happily ever after forever, because what can you do when you’ve fallen into someone else’s time but cling to the people who rescued you? It’s not like you’ve got anywhere else to go! And Owen will be left out in the cold, and Tosh will know how much it fucking hurts because of their previous state of mutual soppiness. 

“Owen?” says Ianto, and Owen realizes that everyone else has wandered off to do productive work. 

“Don’t give that thing any coffee,” he says. “Caffeine, you know.” 

“I’ll stick to decaf,” says Ianto. 

“You keep decaf here?” 

Ianto’s mouth twitches into a tiny smirk. Owen suspects Ianto of using the decaf coffee to exact very subtle revenges on his teammates. It’s the kind of thing he would do. 

“Owen?” says Ianto again.

Owen has the feeling that he’s been standing immobile in the middle of the Hub for far too long. “Yes?”

“You’re cluttering up the Hub. Don’t you have some kind of work to do?” 

“Paperwork,” says Owen, because if he fucks it up (and he will) Ianto will be saddled with clearing it up. Ianto isn’t the only one who can be passive aggressive.

But Ianto, unlike Owen, has allies. “You have to examine Anwen,” yells Gwen. 

“Great. I always wanted to die being trampled by a brontosaur.”

“Scratch her behind the ears,” Tosh calls. “That will put her right to sleep.” 

Owen can’t even find the ears so he sedates it, with difficulty; his fingers tremble on the syringe. He runs through the examination on autopilot, blood samples, x-rays, etc., so tired, should have stayed home. The brontosaur breaths soft and deep like sleeping Ianto. It has big bluish eyes with creepy slit pupils and it blinks at him lazily just as he finishes checking its blood pressure. 

Owen scratches its neck ridges and it swoons. It’s a pity people aren’t so simple. 

Then again, he basically collapsed for Ianto with no more stimulus than that. But Owen is hardly a representative sample. 

The brontosaur whuffs and Owen, in an outbreak of sentimentality that is surely of symptom of his illness, entertains the idea of old blankets in some corner of his flat for the thing, which he will call George or Fluffy or possibly Ianto (in case it explodes). 

“Done?” says Gwen from the top of the stairs. She’s been watching, he can see it in the evil “I always knew you had a squishy, pathetic heart!” look on her face. 

“Am I getting in the way of you killing this one too?” says Owen.

Gwen gives him a vile look. Owen wonders sometimes if she blames him about Jack—like Owen’s brattiness might have tipped the scales on Jack’s leaving. “Come along, Anwen,” says Gwen, and the brontosaur bounds up the stairs to her like a puppy. “Ianto’s ordered in lunch.” 

Owen’s hands are trembling too hard for chopsticks, so he takes a carton of fried rice back to the autopsy room where he can eat with his fingers. The chatter and laughter of the rest of the team drifts down the stairs in bursts. They haven’t laughed like that since Jack left. Presumably it’s the addition of the brontosaur, not the fact that Owen isn’t eating with them. 

The rice nearly puts Owen to sleep. He oughtn’t to have come to work. He would go back to his flat, but Ianto would see and he would probably insist on giving Owen a ride home and the whole point of coming to work would be shot. 

So he goes to Jack’s room, instead. At least he can sleep in a bed. And no one goes down there anymore, at least not when the others could see, although for all Owen knows Ianto angsts down there when he isn’t harassing Owen. 

Owen’s been in Jack’s room once before, because having sex with Jack is a Torchwood rite of passage. The room hasn’t changed much. Not that Owen was really looking at the scenery the first time around, but he does remember Jack’s shelves of weird stuff from the Rift. Jack wouldn’t explain what any of it was. 

Owen collapses on the optimistically sized bed and waits for the room to stop spinning. He feels haunted; he imagines Jack and Ianto standing just in front of the shelves, Jack’s arms around Ianto with his hands in Ianto’s front pockets, explaining some completely unsexy alien artifact so that it sounds pornographic. Ianto leaning back against Jack with that tiny smirk. 

Owen hurls one of the pillows at ghost-Ianto. It breaks one of Jack’s specimens (serves Jack right). Owen frets at the bed, trying to get comfortable. 

He’s interrupted by the sudden appearance of Ianto, looking around the room wide-eyed and excited and then confused and finally, when Owen throws a pillow at him to see if he’s real, disappointed. “It’s you,” he says. 

“Who did you expect?”

Ianto presses his lips together and moves to the first pillow Owen threw. Ianto picks up the pieces of whatever it broke gently, like they’re parts of an heirloom. “Why did you come into work today?” he asks. 

“Figured you couldn’t last another day without me.”

“If we need you that badly we’d call you.” Ianto sets the artifact pieces on the corner of the shelf and comes to sit beside Owen. He touches Owen’s hair. “You need a shower.”

“You offering?”

“Do you want me to?” 

Owen presses his face into Ianto’s suit coat and refuses to hear the question. Ianto pets his hair. Owen kisses his hand, and just to make a bad situation worse sits up and kisses Ianto’s lips. 

The response is gratifyingly intense. Owen’s too dizzy for this to feel more than all right but he wraps his arms around Ianto and he can feel Ianto’s heart and his breath and Ianto kissing him back, Ianto’s hands in Owen’s hair, Ianto’s throat vibrating under Owen’s lips. 

This is going to make things even more awkward and bitter and awful, but Owen is comfortable with awful.

Ianto pins Owen’s wrists next to the pillow and leans his hip into Owen’s stomach to make him stop. “No,” he says. “This is a terrible idea.” 

Owen leans up and kisses him and Ianto pushes him back down. Jack’s sheets are satin. “You’re wrong,” Owen mutters. 

“I’m never wrong,” says Ianto. 

Owen is too tired to list the reasons why that’s ridiculous, and anyway Ianto probably has a long, pent-up list of Owen’s wrongs that he’s just dying to voice and by the end of it he’ll recall why he doesn’t want to be in the same room with Owen, let alone pin him to Jack’s bed. Owen tries to part Ianto’s legs with his knee, get him back in the appropriate mood. He doesn’t have the strength to overcome Ianto’s resistance. 

“You’re just too chicken to cuckold Jack in his own bed,” says Owen. 

“Jack never cared who else I slept with,” Ianto mutters, and flushes as if ashamed by the admission. 

“Then live a little,” Owen mutters, and arches his back so he’s pressed against Ianto. Ianto whimpers and bites his lip until it bleeds. “You can be louder,” Owen murmurs, shooting for seductive. “Unless you’re afraid Gwen and Tosh will hear? Come down and join in?” 

“So you can ruin the tattered remains of your relationships with all the members of Torchwood at once? Anyway, the room’s soundproof.” 

Because that’s not creepy at all. “How did you know to come down here then?” asks Owen.

Ianto shifts uncomfortably. His breath tickles Owen’s ear. “I have a bug in here.” 

That might be even creepier. “It wouldn’t ruin all my relationships, anyway. I can have relationships with people I’ve had sex with.”

“Gwen hardly speaks to you.” 

“Jack still spoke to me.”

Owen didn’t mean that as a dig, he just wasn’t thinking. Ianto’s mouth wavers and his face droops and he’s moving away from Owen. Owen really wants him back. He slips his wrists from Ianto’s loosened grasp and catches Ianto’s head and pulls Ianto down on top of him. 

Ianto lands awkwardly, his chin on Owen’s nose and his muscles stiff with protest.

“It was only the once,” Owen says, and adds, lying, “It was before you were, um.” 

“Sleeping with my girlfriend’s murderer?” Owen can’t read Ianto’s voice, which is unusual (Ianto’s blank façade is showy but not nearly as functional as Ianto would probably like). Wry. Self-deprecating. Angry? With Jack?—more likely with Owen. 

Anger is all right. Owen appreciates anger. 

Ianto wriggles so his mouth is pressed in Owen’s hair. Owen nibbles ruminatively at Ianto’s shirt, over his collarbone. It’s very cozy. If this goes on Ianto may notice that Owen likes him. 

“So about that cuckoldry,” murmurs Owen. 

“And I thought you were going to be sick on me if I tried anything funny.” 

It’s entirely possible. “Meet here same time tomorrow?” 

Ianto kisses his ear. Owen melts. Thank God Ianto can’t see his face. “Or, you know, my place again,” Owen says, and tries not to die because his voice sounds pathetic.

A kaboom blasts through the Hub. 

Ianto’s off Owen in seconds, in a fresh shirt (he has a supply of suits down here) in moments more, and up Jack’s ladder before Owen even sits up. He follows, too dazed to be concerned although for all he knows that sound was the world ending (or Jack coming back).

But it’s the brontosaur. Evidently sweet and sour sauce didn’t agree with it.

Of course it makes Owen vomit. Gwen squeaks that he oughtn’t have come into work like that and Tosh brushes at her eyes and upbraids him for contaminating the evidence (this is why Owen, in a parallel universe, might love Tosh: the mixture of sentimentality and taking her work _seriously_ ) and Ianto drives him home. There’s tea and a promise to be back later. Owen pretends it irritates him. 

Once Ianto's gone, Owen stares out his windows and considers his options again.


	4. The Shower Scene

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Oh no. I am _not_ letting you give me a shower.”

“You need a shower,” says Ianto.

Owen groans and presses his arm over his eyes as Ianto tears about Owen’s flat letting in sunlight. “Why are you here?”

“I said I’d come back.”

“At six in the morning?” Owen had stayed up late waiting for Ianto and fallen asleep sulking when he didn’t arrive. 

“Seven, actually. Rise and shine.”

“You cannot possibly be this perky.”

“It will go away,” says Ianto. He’s wearing a t-shirt. Owen didn’t even know Ianto owned any t-shirts. “I was up all night watching the monitors for Rift activity.”

“It drove you bonkers, did it?”

Ianto rips the covers off Owen’s bed and wrinkles his nose. “You really need a shower. Come on.”

Owen’s already shivering from the chill cutting through his boxers and t-shirt. “Oh no. I am _not_ letting you give me a shower.”

“You’re going to scare aliens away just with the strength of your smell,” says Ianto, tugging Owen’s bony toothpick arm. 

“That’s a good thing,” says Owen. Ianto shows no signs of returning the covers. “I’m not giving you free rein to feel me up all over.” At least not without an argument to keep up appearances. 

“It will be completely non-sexual,” Ianto says.

“Uh huh. Because you don’t have any sexual feelings for me of any kind. The tongue kissing is platonic.”

Ianto considers this. “Pretty much.”

“You need therapy,” Owen moans, trying to hide under his pillow. Ianto pulls him right out of bed and pins Owen’s arms to his sides. Ianto is wonderfully warm. Owen wriggles in a half-hearted attempt at escape. “Let me go. The shower’s going to give me hypothermia.” 

“I’ll make it nice and hot,” Ianto says right into Owen’s ear. 

Owen feels dizzy. “That was an innuendo,” he protest. 

Ianto carries Owen to the shower. “That was a factual statement about the water temperature,” Ianto says. He’s holding Owen (trembling, from cold and because he hates being picked up) with one arm and fiddling with the shower controls with the other. “This will feel better if you relax,” he adds. 

The water roars down on Owen’s face as painful as a tattoo. “We’re showering still dressed?” bleats Owen. 

“I thought you were complaining about the innuendos?” says Ianto. He starts rubbing Owen’s back and Owen shrieks and jumps away. “It’s just soap,” says Ianto, waggling the bar in front of Owen’s face. “You use it to get clean.”

Ianto’s giving him an actual shower. Only Ianto would do something so perverse and cruel. “I hope Myfanwy eats you,” gasps Owen.

“Is personal hygiene really so awful?” says Ianto, pulling Owen into a hug and rubbing the soap into Owen’s back. Owen tries to ignore him; he stands up straight, as far from Ianto as he can get, he tries to pay attention to the blasting water and his headache and his sore throat, not Ianto’s chest, or, worse, Ianto’s hands lathering his back.

“Don’t touch me like that,” Owen whispers, almost soft enough that the pounding water drowns it out. 

“You don’t seem to mind,” Ianto says. 

Ianto’s hands feel wonderful. Owen can’t stand it. Any moment he’s going to collapse and Ianto will _cuddle_ him. Owen doesn’t cuddle. No, that’s a flat-out lie that even Owen can’t believe. Owen cuddles other people, he doesn’t let himself be cuddled, except by Diane and look how that turned out. 

“Have you got the water on at fire hose level?” he complains, trying to reestablish some distance. “I’m going to drown. Are you trying to soap my shirt right off my back?” 

Ianto lets him go. Owen misses the warmth and comfort of Ianto’s chest; he feels suddenly like he’s drowning in the steam and the cacophony of water on tile. Ianto’s shirt and boxers cling like they’re painted on (God, Owen’s not even thinking about that). The water runs seductively along the slope of his back. Not thinking about that. Let the water drown out his thoughts. 

Ianto shampoos Owen’s hair. Owen squeaks and shies away and slips on the tile, and Ianto pulls him close again. Owen giggles from nerves and arousal. “What kind of shampoo is that?” Owen babbles. “Is it something flowery? I can hardly smell. It feels flowery.” Ianto laughs and massages it into Owen’s scalp. 

“Shhh,” says Ianto, sliding one hand out down Owen’s cheek. “You’re getting yourself hysterical.” The shampoo stings Owen’s eyes and he closes them. Ianto breathes on his face, his breath cool compared to the shower steam, and Owen tenses and wants Ianto to kiss him and wishes he had never agreed to this shower, never. 

Ianto kisses him. Owen opens his eyes, because God knows what Ianto will do unwatched, just in time to get an eyeful of water as Ianto pulls him under the showerhead to wash the shampoo out of his hair. He’s holding Owen so tightly that their t-shirts will meld at any moment. “I have soap in my eyes,” Owen complains breathlessly. “My eyes hurt and the water hurts and it’s way too hot.” 

“A cold shower might be more useful now anyway,” Ianto says wickedly. He toys with the shower control, the filthy tease. Owen bats his hand away. Ianto spins Owen, like they’re dancing, and Owen clings to him dizzy and confused as Ianto rubs the washcloth over Owen’s sides, digging his thumbs into the white cotton clinging to Owen’s bony shoulders. “Relax,” he murmurs again. 

Owen shudders and shakes his head—it feels too good, Ianto’s hands and the hot water—he wishes Ianto would just cut to the point. He doesn’t want to be part of Ianto’s weird soap fetish. 

Ianto turns Owen so Owen’s back is pressed to Ianto’s chest. Ianto hums in Owen’s ear as soaps Owen’s front, rubbing Owen’s shoulders, murmuring “Relax, relax,” so softly that it blends in with the water. Ianto crosses his arms over Owen’s chest and kissing his neck and the side of his face. 

It’s all too much. Owen panics and jerks out of Ianto’s arms and and ends up sitting on the tiles with his knees hunched to his chest wishing he could die, because this is so embarrassing. God, that was stupid. God, he wishes Ianto had just been planning straight-forward if absurdly tidy-minded sex instead of this orgy of attention and affection. 

“I’m sorry,” Ianto mumbles. He looks like he wants to jump out of Owen’s windows. “I’m sorry. I’ll, um…” and Ianto flees the scene. Owen’s afraid Ianto will abandon him again but there’s a stream of Ianto noises from the other room. Owen’s teeth are chattering so loudly that he can hear them over the water. Perhaps he ought to move.

Suddenly Ianto reappears, still dripping, carrying a mug of coffee. Owen tilts his head to look up at Ianto. Perhaps he ought to stand up. Sitting in this fetal crouch is absurd. But he’s too cold to move. “Did you drip all over my apartment?” he asks.

Ianto bobbles the mug. “Sorry,” he mutters, as if Owen’s apartment is in any fit state for a few drips to matter. He stands uncomfortably for a minute, then hands Owen the coffee.

Owen watches the shower spray patter on the surface of the coffee. His hands are trembling so he can’t hold the cup steady. 

“Perhaps you ought to dry off,” says Ianto, squatting next to him. 

“No,” says Owen.

“Hypothermia,” says Ianto, taking the coffee away from Owen and grasping his arm to pull him out. Owen grips Ianto’s forearm and yanks him into the shower. Ianto hits his head on the wall. 

“Sorry,” Owen mutters, scooting over and petting Ianto’s hair clumsily.

Ianto gets his hands under Owen’s armpits and drags them both upright into the cascading water. Owen burrows into Ianto, trembling still, but it’s the cold, just cold, he’s not nervous. 

“Right then,” mutters Ianto. He starts washing Owen’s face. Owen shivers again and pushes his face into Ianto’s shoulder. “Right then, your face can remain filthy,” murmurs Ianto. He shifts his grip—somehow he’s holding Owen even tighter—and starts soaping Owen’s hips. Owen whimpers and bites Ianto. “Are you all right?” 

“Shut up,” mutters Owen. Ianto obediently quiets and caresses soap over Owen’s thighs, knees, shins, feet. He strokes the arch of Owen’s foot and threads his fingers between Owen’s toes. Owen can taste his heartbeat like a butterfly in his throat, fluttering in fright and excitement. 

“You like that?” says Ianto.

“Yes,” Owen says, voice muffled in Ianto’s shoulder and drowned by the water. Ianto kisses his throat and runs his hand up Owen’s leg and down the other. 

“Hmm?”

“Ngh.” 

Ianto kneads the small of Owen’s back, his buttocks. Owen is making absurd little kitten noises against Ianto’s shoulder. He bites Ianto’s shirt to drown them out, the weak wet cotton tearing in his teeth. Ianto’s hands are firm and sure and he smells of heat and soap. 

Owen bites harder, because otherwise he’s going to cry out. He wants Ianto’s skin and Ianto’s mouth and oh, God, he doesn’t want to say Ianto’s name, he doesn’t want to give the bastard the satisfaction, but he’s gasping it around his mouthful of shirt: _Ianto, Ianto, Ianto._

Ianto slides one hand under Owen’s shirt and the other up Owen’s boxers, and murmurs, “Owen?”

So he has an excuse, at least, to be choking Ianto’s name as he comes. 

Owen crumples against Ianto, content and embarrassed, but Ianto strokes his hands over Owen, head and back and chest and hips, running over him like water. Owen lulls into half-consciousness, warm and sleepy and floppy as Ianto finishes washing him, the roaring water like a lullaby.

Then Ianto shuts the water off, and the silence is horrid. Owen snaps back to reality, where Ianto will never let him forget this pathetic collapse, and tenses in horror as Ianto removes him from the shower and dries him with a towel the size of a bed sheet. 

Owen revives enough to stop Ianto from undressing and redressing him like a doll—“Go away,” he says, clutching the towel around him to protect the tattered remains of his dignity. “Go make more coffee. Go bother someone else.” 

Ianto is still heavy-lidded with self-satisfaction as he leaves, but as mortifying as it is Owen admits Ianto deserves that expression. 

Owen takes a long time dressing, to make absolutely damn sure that Ianto is decent by the time Owen sees him again. 

Ianto is mostly dressed when Owen reenters the bedroom—he’s short his coat and tie—but he’s sprawled, enticing and asleep (the night watching the Rift must have caught up to him), on Owen’s bed. Which has fresh sheets. And he made coffee and toast and eggs. 

Owen considers waking Ianto up to complain about the eggs (sunny-side-up?) but he’s just as happy not to have to speak to him right now (because it would be so awkward). Besides, Ianto is making a hedgehog face and his breath is all whistle-y, which Owen could surely use as counter-blackmail. 

So Owen sits, leaning against Ianto and picking at the toast. He meant to stay awake, he did, but Ianto is warm and his breath, whistle and all, is soothing, and Owen falls asleep.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I’m going to die from a germ that made an impossible interspecies jump,” says Owen. “Want my liquor stash, Gwen?"

Two weeks after getting sick (three weeks and a day after Jack…whatevered…not that Ianto’s counting) Owen shows no signs of getting better, so Tosh insists on a blood test.

Team Torchwood stands clustered around the autopsy table, watching Owen draw blood samples from the crook of his elbow. “We should take bets,” says Owen, his voice dreamy and appallingly cheerful. “What kind of alien plague this is, and how quickly it’s going to kill me.”

Blood always makes Ianto nauseous. 

“It’s not going to kill you,” Gwen says gently.

“Put you down for three weeks, shall I?” says Owen. “You always were an optimist. Tosh for two. Ianto, I guess that leaves you one…” 

Ianto wants, desperately, to be elsewhere. “Coffee, anyone?” 

“It will contaminate the blood samples,” says Tosh.

“Perhaps later,” says Gwen. 

“Winner gets my eulogy!” cries Owen, clapping his hands.

Ianto doesn’t like the smell of blood either; it makes his throat hurt and his eyes smart.

“Do members of Torchwood get eulogies?” Owen asks. “If they don’t go bat shit like Suzie.” 

Tosh is absorbed in the blood samples (and perhaps willfully ignoring him). Gwen glances at Ianto uncertainly. “No,” snaps Ianto.

He’s lying, but he wants to quash the conversation, not move step by step through Owen’s dream eulogy. 

Owen is not chastened. “You can have my record collection, Tosh,” he says, still in that awful cheerful voice.

Tosh is definitely ignoring Owen. Ianto can tell from the tense set of her shoulders. Gwen’s breath is odd and jerky, and Ianto’s fists (safely hidden behind his back) are clenched. He wishes Owen would stop talking. 

“You can throw out the ones you don’t like,” Owen tells Tosh’s back, as if she were worried only about never-used records cluttering up her flat. She makes a warding gesture with one hand and punches a computer key. DNA scrolls across the screen. “It’s a bacterium,” Tosh says. “From the weevils.”

“Is that even possible?” asks Owen. 

Tosh has evidently dissociated right out of Owen’s imaginary funeral: her voice is appalling buoyant. “It shouldn’t be,” she chirps. “But evidently—”

“I’m going to die from a germ that made an impossible interspecies jump,” says Owen. “Want my liquor stash, Gwen? A year’s supply of single-malt whisky.” 

“Only if I can drink it with you,” says Gwen, squeezing his shoulder. “Tosh will find a cure, won’t you, Tosh?” 

Gwen wasn’t here when the woman before Suzie got Martian pneumonia. Jodie, or was it Josie? Died all in spots. Ianto pushes his fists into his pockets. They have better computers now. Josie wasn’t very healthy anyway. (Because Owen was in such good health, living on liquor and coffee and snippets of sleep in between alien hunting.) 

“—histamine in the parietel cells,” Tosh is saying, bouncy as a child high on candy floss. Ianto wants to brain her. “It’s really quite fascinating. The effects on gastric acid…” her voice fades as her hands flickered over the keyboard.

“Will Owen…?” Ianto asks, his voice odd and floating and unable to settle into a sentence. His stomach churns like cake batter. 

“Ianto!” says Owen, as if he’s just noticed him. “You don’t want a gigantic television set, do you?”

“No.” 

“It’s quite the interspecies jump,” says Tosh, pounding obnoxiously on her keyboard. “This could revolutionize our understanding of epidemiology—”

“My coffee machine!” cries Owen, thrusting a finger at Ianto. “Essence of Owen in every espresso—”

Ianto snaps. “Owen, shut up.” 

Owen kicks the leg of the autopsy table. 

“Is Owen going to be all right?” Gwen asks. 

Tosh blinks at her, confused. “Didn’t I mention—yes,” she says. “I’m synthesizing the antibiotic right now. Four or five days and he’ll be fine.” 

Owen collapses on the autopsy table, his breathing uneven. Ianto shouldn’t listen, he knows Owen would hate for them to hear him anywhere in the vicinity of tears. But he listens greedily until Gwen, pressing her thumbs to the inner corners of her eyes, sends him for coffee. 

When he returns, Tosh has moved her attention from the computer to the centrifuge and is doing something horrible and complicated to it while excitedly expostulating on Owen’s disease, and Gwen is sitting next to Owen demonstrating her difficulties with the concept of professional boundaries. Owen looks simultaneously pleased and horrified by the attention, as he does when Ianto holds him. It wounds Ianto’s pride; he had liked to think he was unique. 

“Here we go,” says Tosh, as a hail of lime green pellets spew from the centrifuge. She hands Owen a pill and returns to her computer. “The bacteria is stored in the salivary glands, so you must have contracted it when you got bitten.” 

Bitten. Ianto doesn’t touch his collarbone. How many bites would it take, and how deep? Is there a casual way to ask Tosh if, oh, three or four bites that drew just a little blood—?

Owen gags on the pill. “You’re trying to kill me,” he accuses, removing the tray of coffee from Ianto’s custody and draining the cups like shots of vodka. “This pill tastes like crystallized Weevil spit.”

Tosh, high on her own brilliance, is impervious to even Owen’s criticism. “Take a pill every four hours,” she instructs.

“My tongue will fall out,” says Owen. 

“You don’t use it for anything good anyway,” says Gwen. 

“Oh really?” says Owen. “You weren’t saying that—”

“Do you want more coffee?” Ianto interposes. 

“He should try to get some rest,” says Tosh. “No more caffeine. Sleep, drink lots of fluids—”

“Did your computer tell you that I was going deaf? Because I’m right here, don’t talk about me like I can’t hear,” says Owen. 

Ianto volunteers to drive Owen home. 

He goes to his own flat instead of Owen’s. Owen’s flat is neat enough on the surface, but in the corners and linen closets and the back of the refrigerator horrid things dwell (Ianto, in moments of irritation, thinks it’s just like Owen’s mind). Owen, evidently addled by the mixture of Weevil pills and caffeine, doesn’t notice until they’re in the lift.

“Where have you taken me?” he asks, staring dismally at the rucked-up flowered carpet on the lift floor

“My flat,” said Ianto. 

“I’m not going to your flat,” says Owen. 

“I promise not to make you wear a tie.”

Owen tugs Ianto’s tie: testing the ligature potential. Ianto’s neck seems to fizz under his fingers. “I want to go to my own flat.”

“I don’t particularly care what you want, Owen.”

Owen leans on Ianto, head lowered against Ianto’s collar. The lift huffs anemically. Ianto feels he’s said the wrong thing. “I have better coffee at my flat,” he says. “And actual food instead of desiccated aliens.” 

“You’re taking me to some kind of etiquette-laden hell where I have to keep my feet off the furniture and use special forks for asparagus.” 

The lift chimes as it reaches Ianto’s floor. “At least in my flat the asparagus hasn’t grown fangs,” says Ianto. 

Owen prowls around Ianto’s living room. Ianto retreats to the kitchen, but it’s only separated from the living room by a counter so his eyes keep rising irresistibly to Owen no matter how he tells himself to focus on cooking an omelet. He likes watching Owen move, and despite himself he wants Owen to approve the flat. 

Ianto cracks the eggs with unnecessary force as Owen pokes around the coffee table: CD cases, half-read copies of the Times, a crumb-dotted toast plate and a three-day-old coffee cup that never made it back to the kitchen.

The kettle hisses. Ianto pours tea and flips the omelet, and Owen moves on to Ianto’s shelves: books, a scattering of geodes (Ianto used to collect), photographs. 

Ianto still has an embarrassing number of Jack photographs (although most are Jack with the rest of the team, so it isn’t that embarrassing). Ianto jitters the spatula. Owen’s fingers, spider-like, trace the figures in the photographs. Ianto hopes he doesn’t find the photograph of Lisa tucked behind the Complete Works of Shakespeare. Ianto takes it out on their monthly anniversaries. 

Owen lets the pictures pass without comment. “This is…less anal-retentive than I expected.” 

Ianto is inordinately pleased. (Is he really that desperate for approval?) “What did you expect?” asks Ianto, carrying the tea and omelet to the coffee table.

“Everything alphabetized.”

“Only the books,” Ianto assures him. 

Owen laughs until he has to grab the shelves for support. 

“Sit down,” Ianto says. Owen ignores him. Ianto moves to stand beside him, in case he falls again. He doesn’t look at Owen (for an exhibitionist Owen really doesn’t like being watched) but fixes his eyes on the bookshelves and watches Owen peripherally.

He looks (Owen would kill Ianto if he ever said it aloud) like a doll: very pale with very red cheeks. He blinks lethargically, eyelashes drifting like butterflies; his lips are red and bitten. 

Owen glances over at Ianto. “Brooding about Jack again?”

“No.”

“Lisa?”

Ianto tenses, defensive. “No.”

“I’m running out of people you’ve fancied for you to brood about. The coffee machine?”

“Owen—” 

“Perhaps you’ve got a well-disguised fancy for Tosh?” 

“Why don’t you sit down and eat the omelet, Owen?” 

Owen will not be deterred, any more than he would shut up about his funeral. “Brooding about me, then?” 

Ianto is tired of playing games. “Yes.” 

It seems Owen didn’t want that answer. His eyes grow wide and confused and he is, unbelievably, silent—for three seconds too long, before he snaps, “You really have no standards.”

“You really ought to lie down,” says Ianto. Owen ignores him again, but that’s all right; Ianto likes picking Owen up and carrying him, even if Owen does grab Ianto’s neck like he’s drowning and stiffen like a cadaver, even if Ianto always thinks uneasily that Owen’s even lighter than before (but maybe it’s just that Ianto’s getting stronger). It’s fun; it’s like a game. 

He settles on the couch, leaning Owen against his chest and settling a plate with the omelet on Owen’s lap. 

“Eat,” he orders playfully. Owen clenches his fists and refuses the fork, so Ianto spears a piece of omelet himself and pokes it at Owen’s mouth. 

Owen yanks the fork away and hurls it across the room. “I hate you.” 

“I didn’t realize you objected so strongly to cutlery.”

“Can you just sexually harass me and get it over with?” snaps Owen. 

Ianto always tells himself that if Owen really objected to being harassed, he would have killed Ianto by now; but that would require Owen to be honest with himself, and admitting to being used might be a greater blow to his self-image than said usage. 

Owen rams his elbow into Ianto’s ribs: tired of being ignored. “Ianto,” he complains. 

“I’ll try,” says Ianto. He leans around Owen and kisses him right between his wide eyes. Owen flinches. It’s hard to muster enthusiasm. “You need to sleep,” Ianto says, and tries to pull away, but Owen’s hands are wrapped around Ianto’s elbows and he’s staring at Ianto with unreadable intensity. 

“I don’t want to sleep,” says Owen. “I don’t want an omelet. I hate omelets. I don’t want—”

“ _Owen_.” 

“And you couldn’t give a fuck,” says Owen. He tries to push Ianto off the couch but succeeds only in pressing his face into Ianto’s stomach after a failed attempt at a head-butt. Ianto attempts to displace his own confusion by disarranging Owen’s hair. It’s very soft. Owen is sulking. 

“I want you to get well,” says Ianto, after rejecting half an etiquette book of soothing, meaningless phrases. “And—if—Owen, just go to sleep.” 

“You just wait till I’m healthy,” says Owen, threatening as he can be when he’s curled against Ianto like a kitten. 

Ianto likes Owen falling asleep in his lap too much to look forward to it, but he makes sure Owen takes Tosh’s pills on schedule anyway. 

Owen’s fever has broken by morning. He leaves Ianto’s apartment without so much as a cup of coffee.


	6. The Finale

Three days later, a troop of twenty-third century cultists invade the Hub, searching for their oracle, Roald Dahl. Gwen and Tosh calm them down and take them out to tour Cardiff, Owen hides in the autopsy room, and Ianto is left to make one hundred and fifty cups of coffee alone. 

Owen has been avoiding Ianto ever since he started to get well. Ianto is irritated and depressed and it makes him so clumsy with the coffee cups that he chips one. 

He considers hurling it against the wall. The problem with Owen—or rather, Ianto’s problem that Owen is causing by not wanting to be his Raggedy Ann doll—is that Ianto was using Owen to fill the time he used to spend with Jack, and now that Owen is well (and mostly refusing to be in the same room with him) Ianto has nothing to do but brood. And now he has to sulk about Owen as well as Jack. 

It surely is a bad thing that Torchwood has so many coffee cups that they can serve a hundred fifty people without running out. The coffee will be cold by the time the Dahlists get back, but screw it, what’s the point of controlling the coffee if he can’t inflict his bad mood on everyone else?

The espresso machine grumbles. Ianto kicks it, so it can share the hate too. 

Maybe Ianto could get a cat. It would take care of his cuddling needs, and surely he could teach it to like coffee eventually. 

The machine whines recalcitrantly. Ianto smacks it, realizes that the first coffee pot is overflowing, and replaces it with another one. He smacks the machine again for good measure. He really needs to get laid. 

Unfortunately, while people in bars might be lithe and sexy, they are not surly or obstinate, they will not insult Ianto unceasingly, and they aren’t in the least mysterious. There is no mystery in a bar. Everyone is there to get laid. 

The machine whines again. Ianto throws a pencil at it and contemplates possible hobbies (beyond stalking Owen, which is just to creepy now that he doesn’t have the excuse of Owen’s ill health). Crossword puzzles. Sudoku. Running marathons. He has the legs—

The machine floods. The damned stupid espresso machine, into which Ianto has poured so much time and effort, the only trustworthy thing in Torchwood, has repaid his attentions flooding with water right when he needs it. 

Ianto hits the machine again. 

The machine keens, flashes little red lights, billows smoke from its grille, and shoots a jet of steam over his hand. Ianto shrieks, stumbles out of the room, and collapses.

The machine explodes. Ianto barely cares. His hand. Red. Swollen. Painful beyond the power of expletives to describe it. He’s going to die. 

It’s not the physical equivalent of losing Lisa, not quite of being abandoned by Jack, (as bad as if Owen had died of Weevil flu?)—but, God, it hurts. 

Ianto barely manages to wobble to the autopsy room. 

Owen doesn’t look up from his game of minesweeper. “I’m feeling fine. I don’t want coffee,” he says. “I don’t want tea, I don’t want any beverages, I was going to break my record on this game if you hadn’t interrupted me, why aren’t you leaving?” He turns to glare at Ianto, but he falters when he sees Ianto’s blistered red hand and twisted face. “Ianto?” 

“Coffee machine,” Ianto hiccups.

Owen ushers Ianto into the room and searches for painkillers. “Was that the noise?” 

Ianto is in too much pain to answer.

Torchwood, whatever its faults, has excellent painkillers. After Owen dopes him, Ianto can’t even feel his hand. He might not even be attached to his body anymore, he floats around himself and Owen as Owen rinses and soaps and washes Ianto’s hand, and slathers it with some sort of paste before wrapping it in bandages until it looks like a paw. 

“The coffee machine betrayed me,” Ianto says, as Owen tucks the edges of the bandages under.

“Mhmm.” 

“Why did it have self-destruct lights attached?” 

“I think Tosh experimented on it.”

That shoots through the painkiller haze straight to Ianto’s heart. “On my coffee machine?” he wavers. 

Owen hoists himself onto the autopsy table next to Ianto and leans Ianto’s head on his shoulder. “That’s just what she does,” he offers. “She probably wanted to vivisect me when she realized I had Weevil fever.” 

“She didn’t,” Ianto says, but Owen snorts and Ianto is too tired to argue. He closes his eyes and collapses in Owen’s lap. Owen’s hip bone digs into Ianto’s cheek. His jeans smell like laundry detergent and musk instead of fever. “I broke the coffee machine,” Ianto says again. 

“We’ll get you a new one,” says Owen, running his fingers through Ianto’s hair and cupping his skull possessively. 

Suddenly Ianto feels suffocated. He sits up so sharply that he hits Owen’s nose. 

“What?” snaps Owen. 

“I need to get back to work.”

“You have blisters the size of bottle caps. And you blew up the coffee machine,” says Owen. “There’s nothing you can possibly do.” 

“The Dahlists will want coffee.” 

“Let Gwen take them to a Starbucks,” says Owen. “They’ll think it’s picturesque and quaintly twenty-first century.” 

“I can’t let them think that Torchwood serves Starbucks,” says Ianto. He stands but stumbles, wobbling until Owen pulls him to lie down. 

“Lie still,” says Owen, kneeling over Ianto: straddling his hips, palms flat on the table on either side of his head, leaning over him full length but not touching him anywhere. Ianto feels the heat radiating off Owen. He wants more, he wants Owen pressed against him, he wants, and the intensity unnerves him. Owen’s breath ruffles his hair. 

“What kind of painkillers did you give me?” asks Ianto. 

“Don’t you like them?” asks Owen, ghosting his lips along Ianto’s forehead. Ianto can’t breathe. 

“This isn’t fair,” he mumbles.

“Payback’s a bitch,” Owen says, and kisses him hard, fierce, with teeth and tongue until Ianto’s thoughts spiral around the kiss and his whole body aches with it. 

Owen breaks the kiss. Ianto wants to touch, press his hands against the muscles in Owen’s stomach, pull him down to kiss again, but one hand doesn’t work and the other feels boneless and floppy from the painkillers. He’s not sure he can move. Owen shifts, still not touching, but Ianto’s body thrums like a plucked string. “Owen,” he pleads. 

Owen is definitely smirking when he kisses Ianto again, his mouth closed no matter how Ianto entreats with his tongue. Ianto caresses Owen’s elbow with his good hand (that’s as high as the hand will go) but Owen pins his wrist to the table. “Please?” Ianto says. 

Owen moves as if to touch Ianto’s face but doesn’t. Ianto swallows. His face burns; he can feel Owen’s closeness, then suddenly it’s gone. Owen climbs off the autopsy table, dusts of his trousers and sticks his thumbs in his pockets.

“You can’t leave,” Ianto protests.

“Watch me,” says Owen.

The rat bastard. Ianto would follow, but he can’t quite seem to move or even open his eyes, and soon he falls asleep. 

*** 

Owen, because he is evil, insists that Ianto stay at the Hub overnight for observation. Just in case the alien artifacts Tosh grafted onto the coffee maker made the steam poisonous, he explains. Tosh hangs her head. Gwen hugs Ianto and asks if he wants her to bring him anything the next morning (a hit man to kill Owen, probably, but he doesn’t say that), and they leave Ianto and Owen alone. 

“Coffee?” says Owen, in a tone that might be solicitous if it wasn’t so gleeful.

“No, thank you.” 

“Tea?” 

He’s gone through this set of question approximately five hundred times. “No thank you.” 

A long pause. Owen pretends to watch the Rift monitors on his laptop while in fact using it to hide his snickers (or so Ianto imagines). But eventually Owen can’t help himself, and begins again: “Coffee?”

“No thank you.”

“Tea?” 

“No thanks.” 

“Bovril?” 

Ianto presses his good arm over his face and moans. 

“You’re a rotten patient,” says Owen. 

“I learned from a master.”

“You’re worse than I ever was.”

“You pointed a gun at me; you nearly concussed me, twice; you were the patient from hell. _I’m_ being very patient with your total lack of a bedside manner.” 

Owen is silent. “All right,” he says. “I was a worse patient.” 

“Damn straight you were,” says Ianto, sitting up. The room doesn’t spin, thank God. “Can I go home now?” 

“If you want,” says Owen. 

“ _Really_?” 

“No, you twat, I’m saying that just to torment you. You’re getting boring anyway. Get out. No, wait, I have to change the bandages.” 

The bandages unwind surprisingly painlessly, especially considering that Owen snaps off the last three feet with a flourish. Ianto stares dumbly at his arm—healed already. “Burn salve,” says Owen. “Tosh made it. Has an unfortunate sedative side effect but it’s brilliant otherwise.” 

Ianto may have to forgive Tosh for tampering with his coffee machine. 

“See, I didn’t knock you out because I’m a sadist,” said Owen, stretching like a cat. “All for your own good all along.”

Ianto stares at the muscles moving under Owen’s t-shirt. “And if you got to cop a feel along the way—”

“—you have no room to complain.” 

“Touché.” And he wouldn’t have complained anyway, if Owen had shown any follow-through. 

A silence. Owen taps at his computer keyboard. “I’m bored,” he complains. “I think the Rift left with Jack.” 

The Rift _has_ been unnaturally quiet since Jack left. A horrible thought: maybe Jack somehow drew things out of the Rift to torment Cardiff because he had been bored. 

If anyone had the ability it would be Jack. Ianto doesn’t want to think Jack would inflict horrors on Cardiff, but maybe he didn’t care about wrecking the city. Maybe Jack can’t care about anything (Torchwood; or Ianto); maybe being immortal leached his soul. 

“Bo-ored,” repeats Owen, stabbing his keyboard. 

This seems close enough to an invitation that Ianto attempts to distract them both by snogging Owen. It would have worked better if Owen would have opened his mouth, or at least tilted his head so Ianto could kiss more than the corner of his mouth, or at very least refrained from pushing Ianto away. “Do you want your libido to be responsible for monsters from the Rift getting out unnoticed?” asks Owen, sounding…bored. 

Ianto slumps back on the autopsy table. “Your computer will beep if the Rift so much as burps,” he says sullenly. Bored? Even Jack appreciated Ianto’s kissing.

Jack, whatever his faults, whether or not he was capable of love or even like, always, always wanted Ianto. 

Owen’s smile is far too pointy. Ianto wants to snog him again and storm out just when Owen is begging for more. Or at least annoy the hell out of him. 

“Do you want coffee?” asks Ianto. 

“You broke the machine, remember?” Owen pokes at his computer again. 

“I have a kettle in my office,” Ianto says. “I could make drip coffee.” 

“I spent the entire afternoon hunting up coffee for the Dahlists because they refused to drink Starbucks, because the company invaded Liverpool in 2308, I don’t want—” 

“Did you take them to Café Minuet? They have great espresso.” 

Owen covers his ears. “You’re so goddamn obsessed with coffee. How can you possibly be that dull? I don’t think I’ve ever had a conversation with you that didn’t involve coffee.”

“We have.” 

“Aside from the discussion that ended with you shooting me. And that time we talked about Jack, your other favorite fucking topic.” 

“Every time we’ve discussed Jack it’s you who brought him up.”

Owen is suddenly conspicuously silent. Ianto would love to say, Owen? Are you jealous?, but it’s too likely that Owen is jealous because he wanted Jack (because who would want Ianto Jones, the living breathing coffee machine, especially with Jack as the other option). 

Ianto is sick of not understanding Owen. It’s hardly a stable enough foundation for a working relationship, let alone…whatever.

“I’m going back to my flat,” he announces. “Where the coffee machine works. And I can sob over my photo albums of Jack.” 

He’s halfway across the Hub before Owen tackles him. 

Owen isn’t content just to grab Ianto and kiss him like the climax of a romantic movie; no, he has to tackle Ianto to the floor and nearly rip his hair out by the roots and half-strangle him with tongue and hyperventilation. “You are not,” Owen says haughtily, “leaving me all alone to be bored out of my skull.”

“And I thought I was even more boring than solitude.” 

“No,” says Owen. “You make no fucking sense. You and your stupid coffee and stupid Jack and your stupid fucking caretaking—kiss me already, damn you.” 

There are few things hotter than Owen pressed full-length against him, one hand working Ianto’s shirt buttons (no coat, no tie, no armor) and the other twisting Ianto’s hair as Owen bites his lips. 

Owen, Ianto learns over the next two weeks, bites a lot. Ianto has bite marks on his collarbones and wrists, where his cufflinks chaff them all day, which is annoying except when Owen notices Ianto fiddling at his cuffs and grins and Ianto wants to push him into the next available broom closet. 

Owen, once he’s naked and panting and (preferably) pinned to the wall, the floor, the bed, the table (Ianto may have developed a fetish), is surprisingly pliant. He won’t let Ianto fuck him (Ianto knows he won’t; he doesn’t even ask) but he’ll twitch and arch his hips and back under Ianto’s hands and mouth.

Sometimes he’ll say Ianto’s name as he comes. Ianto doesn’t know what to do with that, and neither does Owen. He slides away and spirals off, and Ianto won’t see him again until he’s clean, dressed, business-like, and bad-tempered. His shirts cling temptingly over his shoulder blades. It’s always a bad idea to touch Owen in these moods. 

Ianto does anyway, once, nearly two weeks after Owen got well. Owen threatens to break his fingers.

So maybe Owen’s just desperately horny, now that he doesn’t have access to pheronome spray. Maybe Ianto is just desperately desperate. Ianto isn’t sure if Owen wants him, knows Owen doesn’t love him, and thinks that Owen even liking him is a fifty-fifty chance. But maybe (Ianto thinks, wincing to himself because the thought is so desperate)—maybe they could work something out. 

But then Jack comes back.

***

The bullet wound from Captain John Hart means that Owen can’t drive himself home, so Ianto, as ever, steps into the breach. 

“Don’t be too long,” says Jack, forehead pressed against Ianto’s, one hand caressing Ianto’s biceps. 

“Of course not, sir,” says Ianto. 

“I want to hear your date ideas,” says Jack, half-laughing, holding Ianto so close that Ianto could count his eyelashes. Ianto is in freefall, as he always is with Jack, loose and light and wonderful but also nauseating. 

When Jack kisses him, Ianto can’t stand quite steady, and he lets go. “Off you go now,” whispers Jack.

Owen is quiet and drawn on the ride home. Ianto’s lips tingle from the aftermath from Jack’s kiss, and the desire to pull over and kiss Owen now. 

He really should get over this obsession with Owen in various states of pain. It’s not healthy.

He makes Owen coffee when they get back to Owen’s flat: drip coffee, because Owen broke his coffee maker in a fit of rage a few days ago. The percolation will give Ianto time to talk to Owen. 

Owen is lying on his bed, arms crossed like an Egyptian mummy, bluish because the only light is from the window. Ianto makes to sit next to him on the burgundy duvet, but Owen cuts a hand between them. “Wouldn’t want to upset Jack, would you? Be a good boy and go right back.” 

“No,” says Ianto, stung.

“Yes,” says Owen. “Don’t lie to yourself. One bat of his eyelashes and you’re on your knees. ‘Don’t waste any time at Owen’s, Ianto, I’m going to fuck you until you forgive me for running out on you.’” 

Ianto examines his cuticles. 

“Say something,” demands Owen. 

“You don’t even like me,” says Ianto. “You just can’t stand anyone having anything you don’t.” 

Owen’s face twists. Ianto flees to the kitchen and stands over the sink, hands flexed, breathing, staring down at Owen’s dirty dishes and listening until the maddening plink of coffee stops. He pours it through the filter again and returns to Owen’s bedroom. 

Owen refuses to look away from the ceiling. The moonlight is sharp on his silhouette. Ianto wants to touch his face. 

“Are you mad at me for going back to Jack?” he asks. “Or are you mad at Jack for coming back to me?”

Owen closes his eyes. God, Ianto wants to kiss him. “I wish Captain Jack Harkness stayed on Neptune or wherever the hell he went,” he says. Ianto feels better, minutely. “And I wish you’d gone with him.” 

Ianto rocks on his heels and sucks on his teeth. “I could come back,” he says. “Later. To check on you.”

“Fuck that, Ianto, I’m not going to be your piece on the side to fulfill whatever it is about you that Jack won’t bother noticing.”

“Maybe Jack would be the piece on the side.” 

“You’re fucking kidding me. Do you think Jack would let you get away with that? He’s a fucking black hole. You won’t be able to resist getting sucked into his orbit.”

Jack isn’t a black hole. Ianto returns to the kitchen so he doesn’t have to argue with the shifting sands of Owen’s moods. Jack is solid and firm and safe as houses. Owen is about as safe as a sandcastle. Jack may make Ianto feel like a bungee jumper, but Owen is skydiving with Russian roulette parachutes. 

Ianto pours the coffee through the filter again. This is going to be the bitterest coffee Owen ever drank.

Ianto goes back to Owen’s room. “He wants me,” he says. “That’s not—”

“He needs you,” mocks Owen. “Do you still believe that?” 

Maybe. Sort of. Not really. “He came back,” says Ianto. 

“If he needed you,” says Owen, “he wouldn’t have left.”

Ianto tries to study his face, but Owen turns away so it’s a disordered collection of shadows that Ianto can’t read. “Do you have any morphine?” Owen asks. 

“No.”

“What use _are_ you, then?” 

“Owen,” says Ianto, quietly. “I’ll stay if you want.” 

Owen doesn’t answer. Ianto listens to cars skidding past on the streets below, the shouts of a drunken bevy of uni students, music rumbling out of a taxi. The electric lights stretch out beyond Owen’s window until they are only tiny pinpoints on the horizon that make Ianto feel freefall again, sickening and dizzy.

He fetches Owen’s coffee from the kitchen and sets it down on Owen’s bedside table. “Owen,” he says, crouching beside him, trying not to plead, “Owen. Do you want me to stay?” 

Owen shakes his head slightly. Ianto kisses his cheeks, tasting salt, lingering. Owen turns away. 

Ianto goes back to Jack.


End file.
